The Rumpus.net » marriagehttp://therumpus.net
Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, OtherSun, 02 Aug 2015 16:50:32 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.2True Romantic #13: God or Fate or Whateverhttp://therumpus.net/2015/07/true-romantic-13-god-or-fate-or-whatever/
http://therumpus.net/2015/07/true-romantic-13-god-or-fate-or-whatever/#commentsFri, 24 Jul 2015 19:00:54 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=139467I lay in bed. I ran my hand over my stomach. I was five months pregnant and the baby moved slowly, like a big fish, sending shivers through my body.]]>The contractions started too soon. I was walking up the stairs of the apartment in Izgrev, Adam’s hand in mine, and the wall of muscles in my abdomen locked up, hard and tight, as if a belt were cinched. I stopped, to catch my breath, letting go of Adam’s hand and grasping the railing. Marius rushed to me and helped me sit down.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Contraction,” I said.

“Isn’t it too soon for that?”

I tried to remember if I’d had contractions like that before, when I was pregnant with Adam. But of course I did have contractions like that, at the very end, when Adam was being born. “About four months too soon.” I said, pulling myself up.

Alarmed, Marius called the obstetrician and made an emergency appointment. The doctor examined me, asked how often the contractions were happening. When I told him that I’d felt them for a few days, but they were so gentle that I’d ignored them, he looked concerned. He folded his arms over his chest and spoke to Marius Bulgarian, a language I found thick as honey, filled with gulps and slurs and swallows. The doctor shrugged as he spoke, as if there was nothing he could do.

“What’s happening?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

“You’re having regular contractions,” Marius said

“I know,” I replied. “I can feel that. Does he know why?”

“No,” Marius said. “You’re dilated, which means that there’s a chance the baby could be born early.”

“How many weeks am I now?”

“Eighteen,” Marius said.

“Is that enough for the baby to…”

Marius shook his head. “If he’s born now, they won’t be able to do much for him. At twenty-two weeks, there is more they can do. He wants you to admit you to Maichin Dom.”

Maichin Dom was the Maternity Hospital of Sofia, a huge concrete soviet cube with darkened windows, old leather furniture, industrial art, and lightless hallways. Sofia’s primary public facility for pregnant women, it had once been the only place in the city where babies were born. Marius had been born there, and his daughter Rada had been born there. Now, the hospital was severely underfunded and understaffed, with whole floors closed down, hallways without light bulbs in the fixtures, cracked windows, and insufficient medical equipment. There were private clinics popping up in Sofia, Marius told me, and these clinics might have nicer facilities, but they were unregulated. The best doctors in Bulgaria were still at Maichin Dom.

Marius checked me in, and a nurse led me to a room on the fifth floor. As we stepped out of the elevator and walked to my room, a cluster of pregnant women stood together near an open window, smoking and drinking beer. The women were laughing and talking, making the most of whatever illness had brought them to Maichin Dom. There was a man standing with them and, as we passed by, I realized—from the stethoscope around his neck—that he was a doctor. A doctor having a smoke with his pregnant patients? I gave Marius a look of surprise and he shrugged. “Smoking is really common in Bulgaria.”

A particular smell filled the hallways, a mixture of ammonia, dirty socks, and stale smoke that would stay with me long after I left a month later. The smell would lodge itself into the recesses of my memory, and once in awhile—years later, in a grocery in Chinatown, for example, or in our moldy basement in Providence—I would find myself back in Maichin Dom, surrounded by the memory of the dark hallways and the strange pack of smoking woman.

I had a room with a twin bed, bleached sheets, and one thin pillow. There was another bed, the occupant absent but signs of her remaining on her bedside table: a hairbrush, a bottle of perfume, and a cell phone.

“I’ll go home and get some things,” Marius said, seeing the state of the room. “What do you want?”

“Books. A notebook. My fountain pen. And some of those Lindt hazelnut chocolate bars. And it’s a little cold in here. Maybe a heavier blanket?”

“Okay,” he said, sighing heavily, clearly pained to be leaving me there. “I’ll be bringing you food every day. If you need something else, I can bring it then.”

“There isn’t food served here?” I asked.

“There is,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “But you won’t want to eat it. It will be nettle soup and black bread every day.”

“Can you bring Adam to visit?” I said. He was staying with Yana and Ivan in Bankya. “I want him to know everything is fine.”

“I’ll see,” Marius said. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for him to see this place. We don’t want to scare him.”

I changed into my nightgown and tried to find the bathroom. It was down the hall, just past the smoking window, a two-stalled lavatory with an exposed bulb swinging from the ceiling. There was a concrete shower area at the far end of the room with a few rubber hoses poking from the walls. The toilets themselves had no seats—I couldn’t tell if they had been broken and were never replaced or if there were never seats to begin with—and so I had to somehow balance my pregnant self over the toilet, holding my maternity dress with one hand and the wall with the other, to pee. The first time I tried this acrobatic endeavor, I tipped sideways, sprinkling urine all over my legs. There was no toilet paper to be found—you needed to bring your own apparently—and so I used my dress.

But more problematic than my inability to balance my belly-heavy self was the fact that squatting over a seatless toilet brought on contractions, and by the time I’d finished peeing, and went back to my room, I’d had two strong ones in a row. I didn’t know how to tell the nurse that this was happening. There was no call button in my room, and even if there were, she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Bulgarian. And so I slipped into my bed, pulled the hard starched sheets over my tight stomach, and tried to relax until Marius came back.

The reality of what was happening—that I was stuck in an understaffed, drafty, broken-toileted hospital, in which I could not communicate with the doctors or nurses, was starting to hit me. How had I arrived here, at this strange place, sick, alone, my clothes full of pee? Only a few months before, I was in a comfortable rented house in the Midwest, Adam’s wooden train track set up near the fireplace, jazz on the stereo, with a regular income and a toilet with a seat. I felt, suddenly, profoundly disconnected from my own life. The past seemed to pool around me, thick and oily, separate from the present, unmixable. I looked out the window at the hazy fall night, all the lights of Sofia’s apartment buildings blinking on in the distance, trying to imagine what would happen next.

I lay in bed. I ran my hand over my stomach. I was five months pregnant and the baby moved slowly, like a big fish, sending shivers through my body. Never had I felt so vulnerable. All the mechanisms I’d used in the past to save me—my humor and my education and my beauty—were useless now. I was far from home, sick, alone. As I felt the baby swimming in me, I made a promise to God or Fate or whatever force ruled my life: Get me out of this one, and I will be good forever. I will be a good wife and mother. I will be loyal and strong. No more complaints, no more requests: If you help me get out of this Bulgarian hospital with my baby alive, I won’t ask for help again.

I’m in my 30s and haven’t married yet, but marriage is not in my own top five questions and hasn’t been for some time. I’m much more interested in whether I’ll write a book or have kids, and much more defined and governed by race, class, gender, and the changing climate.

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I’m in my 30s and haven’t married yet, but marriage is not in my own top five questions and hasn’t been for some time. I’m much more interested in whether I’ll write a book or have kids, and much more defined and governed by race, class, gender, and the changing climate. I might feel differently if I were a socialite or sorority sister or a member of a fundamentalist religious community, but the world Bolick describes is not the one I live in.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/07/a-different-kind-of-spinster/feed/0True Romantic #12: A Strange Feelinghttp://therumpus.net/2015/07/true-romantic-12-a-strange-feeling/
http://therumpus.net/2015/07/true-romantic-12-a-strange-feeling/#commentsFri, 10 Jul 2015 19:00:51 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=139465I was vulnerable. I was dependent. I didn’t know how to let someone take care of me. ]]>In the beginning months of our time in Bulgaria, we lived in Marius’s house, a big place that Yana and Ivan had given him as a wedding present for his first marriage. The house wasn’t in Sofia itself, but in a suburb outside of Sofia called Bankya, a town known for its hot springs and mineral water. Marius told me he’d chosen a house in Bankya because he thought it would be a good place to meditate. The air was clean and the village small and picturesque. His parents had bought the house half-finished for twenty-five thousand dollars, and had spent about another fifty thousand to complete construction, and while this seemed affordable to me, that amount was more than an average Bulgarian earned in a lifetime. When we moved in, the house wasn’t quite finished, and workmen were still building the kitchen and parts of the exterior. We tried to make ourselves at home there, but the house was a long way from being inhabitable, especially without money to furnish it. And while I felt lucky to have somewhere to live, and felt grateful to Yana and Ivan for their generosity, I couldn’t help but feel that the house was meant for a different couple. I felt the ghost of Marius’s first marriage in everything from the color of the bathroom tiles—which Z had picked out—to the kitchen cabinets, also chosen by her. I didn’t belong there, in that house. Z did.

Marius must have felt that way too, because after a month of living in Bankya, he decided that we should leave. Bankya was too quiet. There wasn’t enough to do. We should live in Sofia, where we could go to cafes and restaurants and enroll Adam in pre-school in the fall. When Marius spoke to his parents about this, it turned out that they were tired of living in the city, and so they proposed a trade: They would take Marius’s house in Bankya, and he could have their apartment in Sofia. They discussed this at the kitchen table, in one of their family conferences, while Adam and I sat silently by. At the time, the trade seemed like a good deal for Marius. The apartment in Sofia was the top floor apartment of a building near the Russian Embassy, in a part of town known called Izgrev, which was near the city center. It was also worth a lot more than the house in Bankya, at least twice as much, and so Marius would be doubling the value his wedding gift.

“Don’t they mind that you’re getting the more expensive property?” I asked him later in bed.

“That’s how things work here,” he replied, stroking my hair.

“You mean Bulgarian parents pay for their kids, and their kids’ wives, and their kids’ wives kids?”

“Pretty much,” he said, shrugging, as if this was really no big deal.

“How long does that go on?”

“Until their kids start paying for them.”

This was a totally strange and foreign concept for me. Money had always been a source of tension in my family. When I was growing up, my father would make a point to remind us kids that he was working for us, and that we should be grateful. I grew up feeling guilty about money, guilty that my father worked so hard, guilty that he spent his hard-earned money on us. As an adult, I felt uncomfortable asking my parents for money. I had been on my own, financially, most of my adult life. I’d worked my way through college, supporting myself by working in a bookstore. My parents paid my in-state tuition at The University of Wisconsin, and I took out student loans to pay books and fees and my rent. After graduating, I went to work in Japan, and by the time I’d met Marius, I’d paid off 1/3 of my student loans. Now here I was, twenty-eight years old and pregnant with my new husband’s parents supporting my two-year-old son and me. I was vulnerable. I was dependent. I didn’t know how to let someone take care of me.

My morning sickness was gone by the end of the first trimester. I was writing every morning, and my afternoons were free to spend with Adam. At night, we hung out in the dilapidated kitchen, with its 1960s cabinetry and cracked tiles. Marius cooked elaborate meals on an old petchka, a Soviet-era monstrosity from the seventies that burned so hot Marius could light cigarettes off the sides. He made mousseka and pasta sauces and curries; he bought me bohza, a thick yeasty Bulgarian drink that was supposed to be good for pregnant women. He went through the stages of my pregnancy with me as if he, too, were carrying our child: we ate together, gained weight together, monitored the baby’s every movement together. We picked out names, boys’ names, trying to find one that worked in both his country and in mine. We had all the time in the world for such things. Marius quit his job teaching Tibetan at the University. It took too much time for too little money. Now we had nothing to do but to wait.

A letter from the US Embassy would be coming any time. We’d applied for a visa waiver, stating our case and providing proof of my pregnancy. In the meantime, I looked for work as an English teacher. I had business cards made and I began trying to find language schools that might hire me, but Bulgaria’s economy was struggling, and even those who could find full-time work made an average of $250 a month. The cost of living in Sofia was lower than in the United States, but not as low as the salaries might suggest. Yana and Ivan were giving Marius 1200 leva a month, which was about $500 at the time, an amount that paid for groceries and occasional movies or dinner out. Even with their help, we didn’t have enough to actually live on—at least not as I was used to living in the States.

And yet, I felt lucky. The situation could have been much worse. Women get themselves into bad situations all the time, blindly following their hearts to distant places with charming men, only to find things different than expected. As it was, Marius couldn’t be faulted. He was doing exactly as he’d promised: He was taking care of me. With his parents’ help, he had arranged for everything from medical care to maternity clothes. It was a strange feeling, letting myself fall into his hands, relinquishing my independence. I didn’t know how to do it. I had never allowed myself to be so vulnerable before. Always, I had been responsible for myself. Always, I had been responsible for my son. And now, I was completely under Marius’s control. I resisted every step of the way, and in that resistance I also began to resist the magical powers of Marius, the Magician who had created my dependence.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/07/true-romantic-12-a-strange-feeling/feed/0True Romantic #11: To Find a Rainbowhttp://therumpus.net/2015/06/true-romantic-11-to-find-a-rainbow/
http://therumpus.net/2015/06/true-romantic-11-to-find-a-rainbow/#commentsFri, 26 Jun 2015 19:00:01 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=139462And, although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, some irrational part of me wanted to replace the daughter Marius had lost in his divorce. ]]>It was at the twelve-week prenatal exam that we learned we would be having a baby boy.

If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said the usual mantra pregnant mothers chant: As long as it’s healthy, I don’t care about the sex. But after the doctor told us the baby was a boy, I realized that I did care. I really cared. I had a whole list of girl names picked out and not one for a boy. When we went to a baby store, it was the pink section that drew me. I wanted the experience of raising a girl and a boy, of understanding the difference between having a daughter and a son. And, although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, some irrational part of me wanted to replace the daughter Marius had lost in his divorce.

Rada’s mother remarried only a few months after Marius and I and, in a twist of irony that could not have been lost on Marius, moved with her new husband to the United States. Marius had limited visitation rights, and we saw Rada rarely before she left. Still, there were enough visits for Marius to spend time with his daughter, for me to get to know her a little, and for Adam and Rada to become friends. Over the next decade, Rada would learn English, go to American public school in Connecticut, become a beautiful, whip-smart, and very American girl. Her life would be different than it would have been had she stayed in Bulgaria, and Marius often said that, as far as Rada was concerned, everything had turned out for the best. And yet, even as we began our life together, I felt a stab of remorse. We’d fallen so hard for each other that we hadn’t considered the damage we’d done. Our love had transformed our lives; now, it would change our kids’ lives. Rada would live with the results of our actions, as would Adam, and no matter how selfishly happy I was, I couldn’t stop feeling that our love had been born out of destruction.

In the strange logic of my love for Marius, I believed that if I could give Marius another daughter, he wouldn’t miss Rada so much. It was a naïve and foolish way to think, and I would never have articulated my feelings as such, but some part of me believed that I needed repair the damage done. And so when I learned that we would have a son, I felt strangely unsettled, as if reality was somehow incorrect. I developed a powerful resistance to the facts. The doctor said it was a boy, but in my mind, the baby should be a girl. It was the same magical thinking that would come to characterize my years of marriage to Marius: I knew the facts, but I didn’t really let myself believe them. I was living in a state of mind that allowed me to deny the truth, even when that truth was as plain as the nose on my face.

“Doctors are not always accurate about these things,” I said, as we drove through Sofia. “Especially at only twelve weeks. There’s a chance he’s wrong.”

“He seemed pretty sure,” Marius said. “He saw a penis.”

“But I was sure it would be a girl,” I said, disappointment in my voice.

“The baby will be beautiful,” Marius said. “No matter what.”

“Of course it will. I’m not making sense. I must be hormonal. As long as it’s healthy, I don’t care about the sex.”

“You know, there’s a Bulgarian superstition that says if you walk under a rainbow when pregnant, the sex of the baby will change.”

“There’s a superstition for everything here,” I said, laughing. Just the other day, Yana told me that if you put your purse on the ground, the money will disappear from inside. Not that it will be stolen, not that you’ll get a hole in the bottom of the bag and it will fall out. It will actually materially disappear. Poof. Yana never, in all the years that I knew her, put her bag on the ground.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/06/true-romantic-11-to-find-a-rainbow/feed/0True Romantic #10: A Small Black Velvet Boxhttp://therumpus.net/2015/06/true-romantic-10-a-small-black-velvet-box/
http://therumpus.net/2015/06/true-romantic-10-a-small-black-velvet-box/#commentsFri, 12 Jun 2015 19:00:00 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=139461“I love you,” he said. “As long as we’re together, we’ll be fine. Let me handle the money problem. I’ll take care of everything.”]]>A number of surprises awaited me when we arrived in Sofia in May 2002.

First, I learned that Marius’s visa situation was much more complicated than we had originally believed. It turned out that his J-1 visa was non-renewable, and he was required to spend two full years in Bulgaria before he could reapply for any kind of visa to enter the United States again, including a spousal visa. Second, Marius’s job teaching Tibetan at The University of Sofia paid about 250 leva per month, the equivalent of $125. And third, I was pregnant.

With these three pieces of information, the landscape of my visit to Bulgaria shifted. I had left home believing we would spend the summer in Eastern Europe, but it was now clear that we would be in Bulgaria for much longer than expected. He couldn’t leave for two years, minimum. Marius’s fears about being trapped in Bulgaria were realized. We were pinned.

Marius hadn’t known anything about the two-year home residency. He was shocked.

“But they must have told you about it when you got the visa,” I said. “It’s not something they would just skip over in the application process. It’s such a huge requirement.”

“They didn’t tell me any of this,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t have accepted the visa if I’d known I was agreeing to a prison term in Bulgaria. There must be a mistake. I’m sure they’ll let me out of it if we go to the embassy and talk to them. You’re an American citizen, after all. They’ll take you seriously.”

Marius did some reading online and discovered that we could get around the J-1’s two-year requirement by asking for a waiver. “As an American citizen, you’ll have more pull with them than I will,” he said, a strain of bitterness in his voice. “Especially now that you’re pregnant.”

He put together a dossier of information about his visa and we went down to the US embassy together, where we spoke to a visa counselor about my pregnancy and our impending marriage. Marius sat at my side, silent. He’d told me before we went in that it would look better if an American citizen did the talking.

“I’ve just found out that I’m pregnant,” I explained to the woman behind the desk. “And I’d like to have the baby in the States.”

She looked at my navy blue American passport. “But you’re free to go back,” she said. “You have no restrictions.”

Of course, I knew I could go home if I wanted, but the prospect of being pregnant and unemployed, with a two-year-old boy in my care, was daunting, to say the least. Yet equally daunting was the idea of staying in Sofia with Marius. I had no job. I had no money. I had a toddler and another child on the way. I couldn’t leave Marius. We were engaged. But, then, I didn’t know how I could stay, either.

“But the baby’s father is here,” I pointed out. “He has to stay in Bulgaria for two years. Am I supposed to go back alone?”

“You can always return here after the baby is born,” she said, sympathetically. “I’m afraid that is about all I can suggest.”

She went on to explain that the two-year homestay requirement was strict; Marius had agreed to it before he took the visa; and that we could apply for a waiver, but it was highly unlikely that it would work. “The only cases in which I’ve seen someone get past the J-1 home requirement is in cases of extreme illness, when there’s a verifiable need to be treated by doctors in the United States.”

We left the embassy, walked out past the concrete blockades and the armed guards, and sat on a bench.

“How could you be so wrong about this?” I asked him, still trying to get my mind around it all. One minute, we were going on vacation, the next we’re relocating to Bulgaria.

“But you know that this isn’t my fault, don’t you?” he asked. “If I’d known, I would have come to the States on a tourist visa, which would have let me travel for six months, or I would have applied for a DS-160 or a F-1 visa.”

How was it that Marius knew so much about visas? Suddenly, Marius was conversant in visa types and numbers and the requirements. He hadn’t known any of this back in Iowa City.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Marius, realizing that I was beginning to feel as trapped as he did.

“We’ll have to stay,” he said.

“Stay? How? Do you honestly believe we can survive on $125 a month from your teaching? And what about Adam? He needs to go to school in the fall. And I need to apply for jobs back home. I can’t spend two years here. This is totally crazy.”

“It’s fascist,” he said, growing petulant. “Your country pretends to be democratic, but look how they treat people? They shouldn’t be able to do this. It should be illegal.”

“But you did this,” I said. “You agreed to this requirement when you took your visa.”

“I didn’t know,” he said. “They tricked me.”

I looked at him, afraid to say what I was thinking, afraid to acknowledge the feelings growing inside of me: suspicion, doubt, uncertainty. For the first time since we’d met, I weighed what he said against the reality of what I saw before my eyes. It did not match up.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he said, his eyes going puppy-dog soft.

“Of course,” I whispered, and maybe he understood that I didn’t quite believe him, because he took me by the shoulders, looked deep into my eyes and said. “Please don’t leave,” he pleaded. “Don’t go back without me. I hate it here. This is my worst nightmare. You’re the only thing that makes my life worth living. You’re my only connection to the future. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

Seeing him in such distress was too much for me. “I’m not going to leave,” I said, pulling him close. “I came here for you. I’m not going to go when things get hard.”

I soon learned that, for Marius, this meant going to his parents for help. Yana, his beautiful, dark-haired mother, and Ivan, his brilliant father, were warm and generous people. I liked Marius’s family right away. They were all the things that my family wasn’t: Over-educated professionals who loved music and art and literature and travelling. They were cultured in a way that my family wasn’t, their dinner table conversations filled with highbrow references, passionate discussions of philosophy and art exhibits and books. Despite all of the hardships they’d experienced—they’d lived through communism and lost their entire savings during a bank crash in the nineties—they had a joy for living I admired.

Part of that joy revolved around taking care of their only son. He was the center of their universe, the thing that gave their lives meaning. When Marius was with his parents, I felt him glow with the same radiant confidence he had at the grand piano in Iowa City: He was the star performer putting on an excellent show, and his parents were always there, standing nearby, ready to applaud.

The night Marius told his mother that I was pregnant, her eyes filled with tears of anxiety. In her heavily accented but grammatically perfect English Yana said, “But think of how expensive this is going to be!”

Yana was right to worry. We didn’t have money for a child. My last check from the University of Iowa had gone to buying plane tickets to Bulgaria, and my savings was about to run out. Marius, it turned out, had nothing of his own. His parents had been supporting their only son for years, since he’d returned from India, giving him money to support his first wife and daughter, giving him an allowance and buying him a car. Through their love, money and time, they had helped Marius survive. Now, he was asking them to take care of his newest problem: me.

Marius and his parents had intense discussions about the pregnancy, hours of talking and talking about the situation in Bulgarian as I sat silently by his side. Marius seemed to be negotiating some kind of deal, although I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. In fact, I never understood any of their monster family conferences, with the screaming and tears and laughter, but throughout my time with Marius, I realized that this was how his family worked. When Marius had problems, they solved them together. They would rally around their son, take out their weapons, and fight whatever or whoever threatened his well-being. It was something I respected and admired even when, ten years later, the enemy was me.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” Marius said, when the family conference was over. “My parents are going to help us.”

“They’re going to get us jobs?”

“No,” he said, his voice soft, as if he were talking to a child. “They understand that—with my visa and the baby coming—we’re stuck. They’re willing to help us through this.”

“Help us?”

“Financially.”

“And they’re okay with that?”

“They are now,” he said. “I just told them that we’re getting married.”

A few days later, Marius gave me a small black velvet box. Inside was a ring with an enormous stone glinting among folds of black velvet. I studied it, taking it in—the shape and cut of the stone, the setting, the band. I was no expert in antique rings, but I knew enough to see that this was not very old. It was too shiny, the metal too polished, the huge stone shining like a headlight.

“That’s your grandmother’s ring?”

“Hmm?” Marius said, raising an eyebrow, confused. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I asked my mom about it, and she reminded me that it had been stolen. I’d completely forgotten. So my mom bought you this.”

I took the ring from the box and turned it, looking more closely. The fiery brilliance faded. The band was made of a gold-colored metal, perhaps gold-plated silver, and the stone was a large and sparkly cubic zirconia.

Two weeks later, we married in the basement of an immense concrete communist megalith in downtown Sofia, a windowless, lightless vault of the Justice of the Peace. Nobody was in attendance, nobody except his parents, who acted as witnesses, and, of course, the judge. There wasn’t money for a new dress, and so I wore a vintage purple shift from the sixties. I was six weeks pregnant, nauseous and homesick, but in the one picture I have from that day I am smiling, a bouquet of white lilies in my hands. I understood not one word of the ceremony. The sound of the language was harsh and chill and elegant, somehow cruel. I tried to catch the sounds, but it was all utterly incomprehensible. Indeed, when it was my turn to say, “I do” I stood silent, unaware that I was being asked a question at all. The judge asked again, and again I didn’t respond. Finally, I heard Marius whisper in my year: “Now you say Da.” I looked at him for a long moment, to capture the flush of happiness in his face, the brightness in his eyes. He loved me. I could see it. There was no reason to be so unsure. There was no reason to doubt him.

“Da,” I said, looking into Marius’s eyes as I spoke my first word of Bulgarian. “Da.”

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/06/true-romantic-10-a-small-black-velvet-box/feed/0The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tamara Winfrey-Harrishttp://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-saturday-rumpus-interview-tamara-winfrey-harris/
http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-saturday-rumpus-interview-tamara-winfrey-harris/#commentsSat, 30 May 2015 13:00:34 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=139108The reality is that there is privilege even within social justice movements.]]>I’ve long been impressed with Tamara Winfrey-Harris‘s incisive essays, which I started reading a few years ago on her blog, What Tami Said. Tamara specializes in the intersection of race and gender with current events, politics, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, In These Times, Ms., and Bitch magazine and online at Fusion, The American Prospect, Salon, the Guardian, Newsweek/Daily Beast, XOJane, The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, Change.org and Clutch magazine. She has been called to address women’s issues for major media outlets, such as NPR’s “Weekend Edition.” Her first book, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America, will be released on July 7th by Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

***

The Rumpus: I became such a fan of your writing online, and it was interesting for me to see how many of your ideas I was introduced to in articles and blog posts evolved into The Sisters Are Alright. Did you always know you wanted to write this book?

Tamara Winfrey-Harris: Yes and no. My initial idea was a book about the so-called “black marriage crisis” and the idea that black women must fix themselves to be more attractive to men. That conversation reached a peak a few years ago and it drove me crazy as an anti-racist feminist. But my publisher wanted something with a broader focus. As I began to think about it, a light went off. Of course! I can write about all the things that inform the conversation about black women and marriage. And those things negatively impact black women in many other areas and contribute to a skewed picture of us. Suddenly, I felt like I was writing a culmination of my work as a writer so far.

Rumpus: Your book really tackles specific stereotypes that shape the way American culture perceives black women. Do you think the articles that spoke about the “black marriage crisis” were aware of how stereotypes were shaping this discussion? Were they articles from within the black community, or in mainstream American culture? Or both?

Winfrey-Harris: I do not, because those things are so ingrained in American thinking—even in the black community. Consider that some of the central figures in the discussion were black men like Steve Harvey and Jimi Izrael. Yes, ABC was talking about it, too—gathering panels to dissect the problem with black women. But some of the same attitudes can be heard on Sunday in the black church and any day online.

Rumpus: Why do you think these stereotypes are still so common in American culture today?

Winfrey-Harris: Fundamentally because they are born of racism and sexism and those habits are hard to break. As long as those oppressions exist, black women will bear the burden of both.

Rumpus: One of the things I loved about your book was how it emphasized how self-love could help radically shift some of these perspectives. I thought of your book yesterday when I watched a clip of Michelle Obama speaking at Tuskegee.

Winfrey-Harris: I think if there is one thing black women can do for ourselves it is to refuse to accept the labels other people place upon us. We may not be able to change what everyone else thinks, but damn it, we can refuse to embrace those things ourselves!

Michelle Obama’s embrace of motherhood, in the face of many feminists who ignore intersection saying that she is wasting her potential, is one example of a black woman making her own story. Michelle Wallace wrote about the importance of black women making our own histories. Michelle Obama is certainly doing that.

Rumpus:I was also impressed to see her open up about feeling shocked that she was being seen in this one particular way—as angry, radical, etc. She talked about that New Yorker cover, for example. Do you think that black women sharing their stories helps to change these dominant narratives?

Winfrey-Harris: I really do think black women sharing their stories helps. For example, I am thrilled that there are many more black women in the pundit class today. I just wrote an article for Fusion about making black women’s lives matter in the new civil rights movement. I noted that pre-2008 elections, black America was represented on mainstream news by a handful of black men (Al Sharpton, etc.). Now we have Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Charlene Carruthers, Joy Reid—all these women. I hope the fact that we now have these powerful voices will begin to change the way people see us as black women, and that it will also open the country’s eyes to our unique perspectives and needs.

Rumpus: I’m excited to read that article.It seems clear that some of the most important and influential feminists today are black women. I think this is one of the reasons I was so stunned by Patricia Arquette’s recent comments, and the ensuing debate about intersectionality.Where do you think that pushback comes from? Is it a kind of backlash?

Winfrey-Harris: For sure, I think the Internet has been sort of an equalizing force on several movements. It makes is harder to ignore voices that have been marginalized even among the marginalized. You know, I would really love to write a book exploring the impact of the Internet on third-wave feminism. I think it is a really ripe subject and a case can be made for both a positive and negative impact.

Rumpus: Some people seemed to be offended by the questioning of Arquette’s comments, even though they were deeply problematic.

Winfrey-Harris: The reality is that there is privilege even within social justice movements. There will always be people who argue that, by asking that our needs be recognized, black women are being divisive. You hear it from white women within feminism. You hear it from black men within black civil rights movements. It is trickle-down social justice and it doesn’t work. It asks black women to wait for everyone else to be free and then MAYBE we’ll get ours.

Rumpus: Which isn’t fair at all.I’m fascinated by Internet feminism it is reshaping some of these discussions… You do a great job integrating interviews throughout your book. What was that process like?

Winfrey-Harris: Thank you! That was hard. As much as I really wanted to do some analysis of how stereotype impacts black women today, what I wanted most of all is to give diverse black women a chance to speak for themselves. I tries to cast a wide net. I was surprised at how eager black women were to talk about everything. One of the proposed titles for the book was Back Talk, because I wanted it to be a rebuttal for persistent anti-black woman propaganda. My only regret is that my pool is not as diverse as I wanted. The group skews toward middle-class and educated. And I am missing the voices of trans women. I mention in the book that the women I interviewed should not be seen as representative of all black women. But that is kind of the point. The public picture of us never could contain our multitudes.

Rumpus: That actually leads me directly into my next question—who would you say is the primary audience of this book?We talk a lot about gender and race in my classes and I am always stunned when students feel like if a book isn’t about their specific experience, it’s not for them. But I also got the sense that this text was something very special for black women specifically, as you said, a place for black women to speak for themselves.

Winfrey-Harris: I think black women will be my primary audience. I wrote this for me. I wrote it for them. We need more writing that is willing to speak to us with our humanity in mind. That said—I think there is something for other women (and men) as well—and not just the opportunity to hear from black women, which is important. But, as I point out in the book, sexism affects all women. It just visits each of us differently. For instance, many of the same sexist ideas that are at the root of the “black marriage crisis” hysteria impact other women. There have long been names, like “thornback” or “spinster,” for unmarried women in America, regardless of race. And all that finger-waving at single, black mothers is going to get to other women, too. The majority of babies born to women under 30 are born outside of marriage—women—not black women. Family looks different today and we all have to deal with it and biases against non-traditional families.

Rumpus: You must be so proud of this book.

Winfrey-Harris: I am! It has been my lifelong dream to write a book. I’ve wanted this since I was a kid. (Yes, a bookish, nerdy one). And I still can’t quite believe that this is happening!

Rumpus: It’s so well-deserved.Have you always considered yourself a writer?

Winfrey-Harris: Well, I have always loved to write. I used to write “books” and “magazines” when I was little. Reading and writing—those have always been my jams. I started my career on a newspaper copy desk and then transitioned into PR. So, writing was always a part of my career, but for a long time, I wasn’t writing for me. That changed when I started blogging in about 2007. Even then, I don’t know if I would have called myself a writer. It took a few years and many published pieces before I felt like I could claim that title. I have always looked up to writers and wanted to be a writer, so I was nervous about, I dunno. Being an imposter. But I am a writer now, I think.

***

Images provided by author.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-saturday-rumpus-interview-tamara-winfrey-harris/feed/0True Romantic #9: The Deep End of the Swimming Poolhttp://therumpus.net/2015/05/true-romantic-9-the-deep-end-of-the-swimming-pool/
http://therumpus.net/2015/05/true-romantic-9-the-deep-end-of-the-swimming-pool/#commentsFri, 29 May 2015 19:00:34 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=137738I took a quick look over my shoulder at the terminal and then, holding Adam close, I stepped into my new life.]]>“Promise me something,” The Magician said one morning over coffee.

“Anything,” I said, meeting his eye.

“Tell me you’ll never leave me.” The problem with his visa had unsettled him. He’d become obsessed with the idea of being separated from me.

“I won’t leave you,” I said. “I won’t leave. I’m here.”

“I can’t make it through this lifetime if you’re not at my side. I’ve lost you before. I can feel it. We’ve known one another in a different life, and this is our chance to make up for it. This is our lifetime together. We can’t waste it. Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said, wishing I could promise him more than one lifetime. I would give him five. I would give him one hundred. “I won’t ever leave you.”

After doing some reading on the US Immigration and Naturalization website, Marius realized that his best move would be to go back to Bulgaria, where he could change his visa status more easily. It was a simple bureaucratic matter, he said, one that could be quickly fixed once he was back in Sofia. But, he said, he wasn’t leaving the United States without me, and I wasn’t finished with my program until May. “I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’d rather be illegal than to lose you.”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Then whey don’t you come with me for the summer?” he said. “We’ll go in May, when your program is done. The weather will be perfect then, and we can go to the Black Sea. We could use a vacation. There are almost no tourists then.”

“What about money?” I asked, feeling hesitant to bring it up. Marius was terrible with money. The International Writers Program had given him a stipend, but he’d spent nearly all of it on a laptop computer the first week of arriving. Until he met me, he lived off free cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at literary events, potluck dinners and parties and the cookies left in the hotel lobby. Then, he moved into my apartment and I cooked for him, bought our food, paid for his phone calls to Bulgaria and whatever else he needed.

“I have a teaching job at Sofia University,” he said. “I can start again as soon as I’m back.”

“But what about all this?” I said, gesturing to my things: my desk and my books and Adam’s toys.

“Put it in storage for a few months,” he said. “And pack Adam’s toys. We’ll replace what you can’t fit in your suitcase. There are a thousand toy stores in Sofia. And playgrounds. And a zoo. And Rada can come over to play with Adam. He’ll learn some Bulgarian. It will be good for him to get away from his father for a few months.”

Marius was convinced that The Poet, whose name was Sam, was unstable. He had some evidence of this, as Sam had been drunk a few times and made angry phone calls to me, but other than those incidents, Sam had been reasonable. We fought about the separation, but when he understood that I was sure, he let me go without a legal battle. We divorced with as little ceremony as we’d married, without lawyer’s fees or court appearances or alimony. Sam offered me custody of Adam, which I accepted, and I promised to let Sam visit Adam whenever wanted. Sam paid $150 a month in child support, which would just about buy diapers, and I didn’t ask for more. I hoped that we wouldn’t fight, and that Adam wouldn’t ever feel tension between his parents.

Because of the custody arrangement, it would be possible to take Adam out of the country for the summer. Marius owned a house and promised we’d be comfortable while we were there. And, most important, by going to Bulgaria for a few months, he would be able to sort everything out with his visa. Once that problem was smoothed over, we could come back to the US and continue where we’d left off.

It didn’t take me long to decide. During the past years, I’d been so busy getting my Master’s Degree that I hadn’t had the option of spending whole weeks of uninterrupted time with Adam. I would have an abundance of time and energy to lavish upon him, a luxury I hadn’t imagined possible before. Most important, I was with a man who wanted what was best for me, who had promised to raise Adam as if he were his own child, who told me that it was time for me to stop worrying and live a little. To trust him. And so I packed up everything I owned in the world, put it in storage, and gave notice on my apartment. I bought plane tickets and prepared to follow my prince charming to the other side of the world.

In May 2002, we boarded a plane to Sofia together. Holding Adam, close, I stopped I for a moment, just before we left, and asked myself if I was doing the right thing. It was a moment of clarity, as if the mist had parted just long enough for me to glimpse something ahead that worried me. I took a deep breath, and kissed Adam’s ear. The smell of his skin, the softness of his hair, his huge trusting eyes—I owed it to him to be sure that I was making the right choice. Was I putting him at risk or was I giving him a better life? How could I know for certain? I looked down the jet bridge, feeling as if I were about to step off the edge of a diving board into the deep end of a swimming pool. Marius was ahead, in the shadowy tunnel, holding our bags. I couldn’t see him clearly, only the distinct outline of a man with open arms. I took a quick look over my shoulder at the terminal and then, holding Adam close, I stepped into my new life.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/05/true-romantic-9-the-deep-end-of-the-swimming-pool/feed/1The Sunday Rumpus Essay: When You Dream Your Husband Is Trying to Kill Youhttp://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-when-you-dream-your-husband-is-trying-to-kill-you/
http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-when-you-dream-your-husband-is-trying-to-kill-you/#commentsSun, 24 May 2015 13:00:45 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=139034These are the exact feminist warnings of marriage.]]>I want to say it was a just a bad dream, that I don’t believe my husband is trying to kill me, or any part of me. When I tell friends about the nightmare, anticipating their dead pause, I laugh first so they know I am not worried. But they pause anyway, wondering, like me, why am I dreaming of my own demise at the hands of the one I love.

Physical violence is a real problem in many marriages, and an expert look at mine for indicators and risks would yield exactly nothing. But merging with another person is by nature an act of destruction—of preconceived notions and preconceived selves—and that chaos has had small but not invisible consequences for me. I feel foolish for complaining, so focus on the last decade’s joys: working from our rented Victorian home, doting on our daughter, shuttling her to school, circus class, and girl scouts in SUV comfort, benefitting from my husband’s downtown Chicago career to which he is also married. Sometimes, though, my vision blurs, and I catch glimpses of another more gothic truth in the rearview mirror, in my reflection in spring puddles dotting my path to the wine shop. The benign details of my traditional marriage that fall through the cracks during the day pop up at night as my worst nightmare—uxoricide—and I wish it felt as ridiculous as it sounds.

Before you brush me off as a pampered but paranoid woman, consider this: when we fell in love I was 34 and, though smitten and snuggling next to him in a rare outdoor winter moment on the Belmont pier, I had the distinct feeling that I was dying. So I told him.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” he had said. And maybe he didn’t. But now I wonder if his confusion was just a cover, something to say if I sensed his plans to care for me so well that my independent spirit would die. That his love would murder my independence.

In real life, my husband is mild mannered, funny and quirky. He doesn’t like to use magnets on the stainless steel fridge (they scratch), will wash a few dishes rather than waste a cycle on a half-full dishwasher, and hides all broken household items in the attic to fix another, more convenient day. He is also successful in his job, a good dad, and about as good a husband as I am a wife. I have always thought of us as mostly well matched, and have dealt with his penchant for household order and financial control with hopeful dismissal. My habit of ignoring the shortcomings in others has never served me in love before. I once dated a man in the South of France who thought he was Sammy Hagar, complete with blond curls, leather pants, screaming rock band, and delusions of grandeur; later there was another who, when not on his meds, thought he was Shiva. After dreaming of my husband’s intent to murder me, I fear once again I have turned too blind an eye.

When, in my dream, my husband told me his systematic strategy for my elimination, we were in a liminal space, the car, driving on a truck route near the train tracks. My nonexistent infant son lay in a Moby wrap on my chest, my seven-year-old girl sat in the back, looking more like me as a child. He fleshed out his strategy in careful detail, as is his way. I saw it like a storyboard: first, he made it look sensible to give up my university adjunct teaching position, since the pay would cost me after subtracting childcare. Then, he made it look sensible to keep our devalued condo during the recession, because although I had little professional support in this city, taking a loss and moving to where I had more connections was too costly. Being professionally adrift certainly did a number on me, I conceded. It all but destroyed my youthful optimism, I thought, and maybe even my youth. But it didn’t kill you, he marveled with a whisper that made me realize, with horror, that I had never seen him angry. He had hidden that, too.

Except for having a second child, all of this had already happened in real life. We made those decisions together, and like chopping a few of my own toes, they hobbled me. We pulled through the wearying phases of early parenthood, the near-foreclosure, and my creative and professional flatline, but I am no longer the person I was; I am cracked by circumstances that couldn’t be helped, re-glued by practical decisions for “us” which, along with grey hair and slim fit jeans, also happen to look fantastic on him. During the day, I call it luck, a blessing, that he seems unchanged on the outside and upgraded on the inside. But when the sun sets I am suspicious.

These are the exact feminist warnings of marriage. I recall the cautionary tropes to “have a secret bank account” and “never give up your apartment” every day as I shove my stuff in the gym locker and press the electronic code that spells our two initials. Most of the time, I chuckle and head up to my favorite cardio machine, the one that simulates running on air. I glide away the anxiety that he’s lost respect for me, and 45 minutes later, in a light sweat, I have forgotten the worst part of the dream. When he opens the door with his will alone and kicks me hard with a leg I didn’t see coming, I hit the street to be squashed by traffic. I tumble towards the curb, catching sight of the freedom I foolishly let go.

It was a bad dream.

Responsible scientists will agree the dream world is not wholly understood. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’ve had enough therapy to know that Freudians and Jungians both will say our dreams stem from what we can’t acknowledge. Experts describe a spectrum between perception and imagination, and depending on the year and the study, the center of that spectrum slides from one side to another when it comes to evaluating dreams. While this is one of those years they say that dreams are grounded mostly in imagination, I worry that five years from now I’ll be floating above my own funeral scene thinking, I guess it was more about perception than they thought.

When I told my husband this dream, he laughed, but not a, that’s-the-most-ridiculous-thing-I-ever-heard, laugh. More like a sad, uh-oh laugh. Maybe because he recalled that eerie moment on the Belmont pier, or remembered an even eerier moment—when I had flood dreams the whole week before the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Precognitive dreams and presentiments are more common that most know. They have been identified in lab settings in which the dreamer is asked to dream of tomorrow’s video, before the video is even selected. When performed across multiple dreamers, or in the same dreamer across multiple nights, statistics have shown significant results beyond what would be expected by chance. The data are so strong, in fact, that a trained precognitive dreamer is being asked to predict the stock market in an upcoming experimental collaboration between two major universities and a financial services analyst. Knowing the future, it seems, may be innate to our unconscious minds.

But unless you’re in a lab setting, there’s no way to know if you’ve successfully engaged the precognitive mechanism until the predicted incident occurs. Even if you keep a notebook by your bedside and write down every dream each morning, no matter how happy, humdrum, or horrible, you still won’t know which is literal foreknowledge and which is just unconscious chaos until the event takes place in real time. By then, in the case of a diabolical husband, it may be too late to take the precognition seriously.

Our cultural reflex is to deny this possibility. Most people defer to the scientific principle that effect cannot occur before cause. That you can’t see the future before it happens. But for dreams that feel precognitive—those that leave a residue of truth after sunrise—I know plenty of people who take action, who write them down and even bring them up in therapy. They may not give these dreams real literal weight, but most can agree that the pipeline between dream disturbance and life disturbance is short. The question then becomes, what part of this dream is real, and how can I make the ambiguity more clear? How can I avert the disaster?

It’s no secret to my husband and I that the energy I give to the marriage never shows up in the joint checking account, or on the mortgage payment. But the shame I have about it, and the shame about the shame, has been pretty much undocumented until now. So I did my future self a solid: I wrote it down in a tiny black notebook where I allow my worst thoughts to exist. I made a record of this horrible dream, and the sentiments around it. I gave mistrust and regret their time in the sun. Then, I made a deal with my husband to regularly discuss solutions to my fears so they can stop haunting me. In short, I brought the dream into real life.

In my more sane and confident moments, I am certain he is the non-murdering gentleman I married. But if I do slip into worry about the symbolism, I remember the outcome of the dream; he doesn’t succeed. I roll away from the speeding trucks and land at the bottom of metal steps leading up to an arriving Amtrak train. With my children safely attached to me, I board, buy tickets, and complacently take my seat on what is an express to Quebec, a nearby, foreign city whose language I don’t remember how to speak.

***

Image credits: “V” by Keer Tanchak, “Swim” by Kurt Riemersma

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-when-you-dream-your-husband-is-trying-to-kill-you/feed/0True Romantic #8: Too Good To Be Truehttp://therumpus.net/2015/05/true-romantic-8-too-good-to-be-true/
http://therumpus.net/2015/05/true-romantic-8-too-good-to-be-true/#commentsFri, 15 May 2015 19:00:09 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=137737Some part of me felt that Marius was too good to be true, that something would happen and he would disappear.]]>For the first few months of our relationship, I couldn’t understand what Marius saw in me. His first wife had been a model, but I didn’t care much about clothes. I was more interested in poetry than Prada, and I dressed in comfortable jeans, flats, and many variations on the theme of sweatshirt. After Marius came into my life, this changed. I started to pay attention to how I looked. I cut my hair and started wearing more makeup. I let him choose my shoes, my clothes, my jewelry. Before we left the house, I would walk by him for critique: “Take off the necklace,” he would say, or “Try the other skirt,” or “Wouldn’t the black heels work better?” Of course, the black heels always worked better. When he thought my fingernails were untidy, I got a manicure. When he wanted less pubic hair, I waxed. My lingerie was a mess of cotton granny panties and white bras, but this soon changed. I watched and listened to his preferences, trying to pick up on his thoughts, trying to make myself worthy of him. Some part of me felt that Marius was too good to be true, that something would happen and he would disappear.

And then one day, that’s exactly what happened. There was a problem with his visa status. Marius would have to leave the country. He’d come to the International Writing Program on a J-1 visa as a guest of the State Department. Part of the fine print of the J-1, he told me, was that he needed to leave the United States before his visa expired—in his case six months—and return to his home country, Bulgaria. He’d been in the US for seven months, which was a violation of the visa, making him ineligible to renew it from within the US. He needed to go home, or face whatever penalties the newly developed Department of Homeland Security had in store.

His anxiety about his visa was exacerbated by the fact that he was divorcing his wife over the Internet. That was the way he described it, as if he’d opted for the Fast Food version of divorce. And in fact, Marius was doing everything remotely, without any contact with his wife. His parents had hired a lawyer in Sofia, and they were giving Marius regular updates by email and Skype about the status of the case. Marius didn’t like to talk about his relationship with his first wife. “There’s no use in talking about the past,” he’d said, and he uttered her full name only one time in my presence. For the remainder of our years together, he referred to her only by the first letter of her name: Z.

Marius was petulant about Z, telling me so many negative stories that I soon thought the worst of her too. Not that I tried to see things from her perspective, that of a woman whose husband visited the United States, leaving her with their child, and then divorced her by email. At the time, I didn’t see how unjust this was and, looking back, I am amazed at how easily I adopted Marius’s opinions. I wonder how the person I thought myself to be—a thinking woman, a feminist—could be so callous and dismissive of another woman’s struggle. But I was. I was only too willing to believe all the outlandish stories Marius told me: That Z’s previous boyfriend had been part of the Bulgarian mafia. That she had sex with her girlfriends, other models who also had mafia boyfriends. That Z had cold-bloodedly seduced Marius for his parents’ money, gotten pregnant, and then threatened to abort the baby unless he married her. His only reason for staying with Z, he told me, had been to save Rada. He had sacrificed his happiness to give his child life. He was a bodhisattva, or so he claimed. And—although I know now that I should have been skeptical of Marius’s characterizations—I agreed.

A bisexual ex-model with a Bulgarian mafia ex-boyfriend married to an ex-Buddhist monk child-prodigy pianist turned writer? To me, all of this melodrama seemed unbelievably exciting, even glamorous. In the Midwest, these kinds of people were totally incredible, a cast of characters out of a novel. But what was probably most seductive to me, what made me love Marius even more, was that he’d left his exciting and beautiful ex-wife for me.

“I’m so much happier here with you,” he said snuggling his nose into my neck one night as we lay in bed. We’d just made love, a nightly ritual in our first months together, and were lying under the covers talking, our limbs wrapped in the tangle of skin and sheets. “I don’t think I’ve ever imagined that someone like you could exist. You’re perfect for me. You’re not pretending to be someone you aren’t. You’re just yourself. You just love me.”

It was true: I just loved him. I loved everything about him, from the way he cooked to the funny way he tapped his feet in his sleep, to his habit of quoting Buddhist texts at strange moments, to his fear of airplanes to his hypochondria to his adorable habit of looking in the mirror fifty times a day, as if to make sure he still existed. I loved his beautiful green-hazel eyes and his full lips and his long fingers. I loved his creativity, how he woke up every morning and went to his computer to write, how there was always another idea, another project, more and more and more to come. I loved his faith in me. Even though I had not published a thing, he believed that one day my writing would be widely read. He compared me to great writers, feeding my insecure soul. I loved that he promised to be good to Adam, and to take care of him as if he were his own son. But most of all, I loved that Marius made everything seem possible. With Marius, the future was bigger and more exciting than I could ever have imagined. For Marius, there was always some new adventure ahead.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/05/true-romantic-8-too-good-to-be-true/feed/0The Rumpus Interview with Shulem Deenhttp://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-shulem-deen/
http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-shulem-deen/#commentsFri, 15 May 2015 07:01:24 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=138014All Who Go Do Not Return, his life as an ex-Hasidic author, divorce and parenting, and how painful he found it to be cast out from the religious sect he'd belonged to for over fifteen years.]]>In 2005, 30-year-old Shulem Deen was summoned to a nighttime meeting with religious leaders in his small Hasidic Jewish enclave of New Square, in upstate New York. The leaders of the Skver Hasidic sect informed Deen that rumors were swirling around that he was a heretic, and had violated the laws of God and the Torah. The tribunal officially expelled Deen from the village and the Hasidic sect where he had spent his whole adult life. He was forced to sell his house and move his wife and five children out of the area as soon as possible.

Thus begins Deen’s gripping memoir All Who Go Do Not Return, detailing his sixteen years with the Skverers and his loss of religious faith, which eventually cost him his community and family. Deen’s memoir is a fascinating glimpse into a largely unknown world regimented by religious ritual, the absolute word of the rebbe, and yeshivas where corporal punishment is commonplace. Residents in New Square who challenged the rebbe could be subject to violence or vandalism of their property.

Deen was drawn to the Skverers as a fourteen-year-old from Borough Park, Brooklyn. Led by a dynastic rebbe, the Skverers reject such modern influences as radio, television, and computers. The social ideal for men is to become Talmudic scholars, studying obscure religious texts full-time and raising large families.

At eighteen, Deen experienced his first religious doubts, when he was pushed into an arranged marriage with a young woman to whom he was not attracted. Then, Deen began to work in New York City as a computer consultant. At home, he travelled down the slippery slope of listening to the radio, reading secular library books, and buying a computer and a television, appalling his devout wife.

Deen started going into New York City alone late at night, exploring the bars and clubs and realizing that he did not believe in God. Addressing his many ongoing questions, Deen started a blog in 2003 called “Hasidic Rebel,” which became a surprise hit on the Internet. Deen and his wife divorced in 2007, and his former Skver community turned on him, raising money to attack his child-custody rights in court, effectively taking his children from him.

Deen, now forty, spoke with me in the decidedly un-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend in a vintage 1970s diner.

***

The Rumpus: Why did you decide to write a memoir of your life with the Skverers?

Shulem Deen: I started writing in March 2010. Writing a memoir as the most natural thing to do for a first literary project, especially for an unknown with no connections. I knew it was something I could do well and sell. Part of me felt that I needed to wait a few more years, to gain some distance from something that was really painful, but I had an opportunity to write the book. I had a really good agent, Rob McQuilkin. There is an expression in Yiddish, “What’s for certain is for certain.” I had an agent willing to represent me, and we sold it on a proposal to Graywolf Press.

Rumpus: Why do you describe the Skverers as one of the most extreme Hasidic sects?

Deen: What makes them stand out? The number one thing is that they are the most insular. They have a whole Hasidic village of New Square that is closed off. There is only one way in and one way out.

I think this should be clear: there are a fair number of larger Hasidic sects. There are the Satmars, the Vizhnitzers, the Belzers. They are essentially of the same cloth, with no ideological differences. There are the Lubavichers in Crown Heights, who are in a world of their own.

The Skverers have little contact with other Hasidic communities. New Square’s population is 8,000. There are 20,000 to 30,000 Skverers in Brooklyn and Israel.

Rumpus: Were your parents born into Hasidim?

Deen: My mother’s joke was that [the] shul she didn’t go to was Orthodox. She grew up in Queens. My father’s family was completely secular, from Baltimore. They both came to Hasidim in the late 1960s. They had gone out to San Francisco, the hippie environment, the Summer of Freedom or whatever.

Rumpus: You were pulled into the Skverers at a tisch, which is literally the rebbe’s ceremonial dinner on Friday night. How were you drawn in?

Deen: I remember reading the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow on the hierarchy of needs, the concept of the peak experiences that humans feel. These events tend to be seen as moments of prophesy, that people interpret religiously, but they are essentially psychological phenomena. In hindsight, that’s what I felt at the tisch. It went on for years.

The tisch itself means “table.” It’s the shabbat meal, but it is the rebbe eating his meal. It started in the villages of Europe, where the rebbe’s followers would eat their own meals on Friday then would go to the synagogue and watch the rebbe eat his dinner. There would be singing. Now that the rebbes have thousands of followers, the sects have developed systems of bleachers surrounding the meals. You can see tisch on YouTube. The followers eat the rebbe’s leftovers. It’s kind of gross, but that’s what happens.

I once said to my teacher as a joke that we don’t care about germs because we eat the rebbe’s leftovers. My teacher said, “We absolutely do care about germs, but there are no germs in the rebbe’s food. There are no germs when you pass the rebbe’s food.”

Rumpus: Could you describe the seven-minute meeting that led to your arranged marriage at eighteen to your ex-wife Gitty? Were you both scared?

Deen: In hindsight, Gitty was a lot more scared than I was. She was more nervous. I was terribly disappointed. I was like, “I don’t want this.” Years later, I realized what was going through her mind. She felt like she was being assessed. I felt I was going to be okay. I knew I wasn’t going to come out of the meeting with anyone saying, “Oh, he’s not really for us.”

I don’t describe Gitty in the book. This book was difficult for me to write. One way to see the book is as the story of a fifteen-year marriage that didn’t work out. I started with the bezdin, the rabbinical court, kicking me out. After that, I spool back not to my childhood, but to my marriage, where I am told, “This is the girl.” I am supposed to spend my life with Gitty, but I don’t really want to, and I don’t really know what to do.

Rumpus: Despite being surrounded in New Square by families with as many as twelve kids, your wife became pregnant, but both of you had no idea how the baby would get out of the womb. What did you think?

Deen: I had absolutely no clue. I thought somehow the abdomen opened up. Somehow the baby would come out.

Years later, when my eleven-year-old daughter asked where babies came from, I told her, ”They come from the mother’s belly. The baby is in from the mother’s belly for nine months.” I didn’t get more specific than that. My wife looked at me from across the table with such a scowl.

Rumpus: How did your religious beliefs start to fall apart?

Deen: Meeting my friend Chezky was where it started in 1996. We argued about blind faith and rational belief in God. We started watching movies together. It was funny how two grown men were so enamored of the comedy Beethoven. I got my laptop in 2000, and started watching three movies a night. Titanic blew my mind. I had never experienced anything like Titanic. People make fun of it for the schmaltz, but for me, it was everything.

Rumpus: After you trained as an IT consultant, a headhunter set up an interview with Bloomberg LP. What was your experience?

Deen: My English wasn’t great, but it was passable. I taught myself how to put a tie on through the Internet. Imagine the greatest amount of anxiety you could have and multiply that by one hundred. The anxiety was almost humanly unbelievable. At Bloomberg, I was being assessed on a personal level. I was sitting face to face with someone thinking, Do we really want a Hasidic? What’s with the payes? (Hasidic side curls devout men wear.) Why can’t you wear a suit? I had all these crazy thoughts about how I was being perceived negatively. I think my perceptions were not completely wrong. People have preconceptions about Hasidic men. I wanted the job, but part of me knew I could not survive there. The stress would be intolerable. I was relieved when the recruiter told me they were going with someone else.

I wound up with a very good job at an Orthodox-owned company. The owner was not Hasidic, but he had two other Hasidic men doing computer work for him. He liked hiring Hasidim because he could pay them less, because they had no college degrees. Hasidic men can be very geeky because Talmud study is obsessed with small details. You don’t know what obsession means until you meet a Hasidic scholar. You start paying attention to the meaning of single letters.

Rumpus: How was it writing about your failed marriage?

Deen: It was challenging because my ex-wife did not ask to have a book written about her. I am not in touch with her. I had to be really careful. In the book, I tried not to say anything really unkind. My feelings for her are not very positive after everything that went down. It was not a good marriage.

At the same time, as a human being, Gitty is exceptional in many ways. She’s a phenomenal mother. I hope that comes across in the book. She’s soft-spoken and gentle. She was very kind and was a devoted wife. She was very bitter about that. She had spent fifteen years being a very faithful wife, doing everything expected of a wife in a Hasidic marriage. The problems started when I started to change. After all her devotion, I was going to take off, going into the real world and saying that I did not believe in this. “How dare you change your view?” she said. “How could you stop believing after everything I have done?” My becoming a different person was a betrayal.

Rumpus: You and your wife had an amicable religious divorce, but the Skver community then helped finance a nasty custody battle. Your daughters stopped talking with you. How did you view this situation?

Deen: People post-divorce have complicated feelings. With Gitty, it was difficult to be in touch with me. She didn’t want the divorce. I wasn’t innocent. We would fight on the phone, specifically about finances.

Gitty got the community involved, because she was angry and bitter. People on her side fundraised. I don’t blame Gitty for feeling the way she did, but it was absolutely scummy for those around her to take this up as a religious war against me.

They didn’t want me to see the kids. My kids were told I was not part of the family anymore. My son told me, “Mommy said you want to put us in public schools. Mommy says you don’t keep kosher.” Clearly, she was telling them things.

Rumpus: The end of the memoir is grim—you lose contact with your children. How did you handle writing this?

Deen: I struggled with that. I wanted to give the book a happy ending, but I realized it doesn’t have one. Now I don’t see any of my children. The youngest boy is thirteen. He no longer wants to come to visits anymore. I found freedom, but what did I lose? If I knew I was going to lose my children, would I have wanted this freedom? I would have tried to do things differently.

There is always the hope that I’ll reconnect with my children, but there is no possibility that I will ever get their childhood back. I’ll never have them as children again. That’s gone.

My oldest daughter has been married for two years. I wasn’t invited to the wedding. I spent the night of the wedding crying. I may never have a connection with this daughter.

Gitty and I had no legal binding agreement. I had no idea that the legal ramifications over custody could be so devastating.

Rumpus: What was your experience when you were pushed out of the Skverers and entered secular American society?

Deen: If you grow up in a third world country and come to the US, you may not understand the language, but jeans are jeans anywhere. You have probably also had exposure to the art and culture of your home country. The Hasidic world is just so different. It is like coming from a third world country in so many ways because you are really underdeveloped. There is little appreciation for anything artistic or creative. Hasidic boys don’t even get much an education in writing in Yiddish. There is a great body of Yiddish literature from Europe, but boys are discouraged from reading literature, for it is seen as frivolous or the books are not Hasidic enough. You are supposed to be studying religious texts.

Rumpus: You joined Footsteps, an organization for ex-Hasdim and ex-Orthodox Jews, after you left the Skverers. What did the group do for you?

Deen: Footsteps is an incredibly important organization for people who leave Orthodox communities. I try to downplay the effect that Footsteps had in the first years I was out, but I was devastated when I first left, to a degree that is very hard to describe. Footsteps holds events and helps people get GEDs. Without them, I don’t know where I’d be. I serve on the board now. Footsteps is a lot bigger now than it was.

Rumpus: In 2010, you started a web magazine called Unpious, which allowed questioning Orthodox Jews and people who have left their Hasidic communities to tell their stories. Why?

Deen: For people to be able to tell their stories, whether they are in a Hasidic community or leaving it, it was important. There was no really good platform. I could guide this and could set it up. The level of writing was more than just blogging. We had a sort of community. It took a lot of work and was exhausting. I have stopped accepting submissions.

Rumpus: There have been other books by ex-ultra-Orthodox Jews, such as Shalom Auslander’s biting memoir Foreskin’s Lament and Leah Vincent’s Cut Me Loose. How did you develop your own voice?

Deen: I am the first male ex-Hasidic author. Shalom Auslander is ex-Orthodox, which is different. It was initially hard for me to find a voice because I had very little exposure to good literature. I read American classics, like Salinger and Hemingway. I read some memoirs, like Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. Frank Conroy, a director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, had this wonderful memoir called Stop-Time. With the voice, I struggled. I didn’t want it to be a tell-all; I didn’t want it to be maudlin. I wanted it to be my voice. It feels self-indulgent and narcissistic to comment on my personality, but I am generally perceptive and insightful. I try to find moments of levity when things are difficult. I am open with my experiences. I share and sometimes overshare.

The book is fairly true to who I am as an individual. I am going for a level of honesty. That was fairly difficult. I had to peel back the layers. There were moments when I said, “I am not being honest enough.” I had to go back and revise. I am not a saint. I know that there are people who are not going to like me. They might read the book and think that I was not the best husband, that I was not always nicest husband to my wife. Coming to accept that writing an honest book means that I might be judged is difficult. I felt that was how it needed to be.